


A Portrait With Feeling

by epersonae, hops



Series: the only life you could save [5]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Best Friends, Episode: e060-066 The Stolen Century Parts 1-7, Gen, Legato, aphorisms, sitting for a painting and discovering your true calling, stealing other people's quotes for philosophy, these chucklefucks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-08
Updated: 2018-05-08
Packaged: 2019-05-03 20:31:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14577060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epersonae/pseuds/epersonae, https://archiveofourown.org/users/hops/pseuds/hops
Summary: Lucretia paints a picture. Taako has an idea. A bet is made.





	A Portrait With Feeling

**Author's Note:**

> Reference to [the gift of a piece of art](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13267161) which isn’t quite in this continuity, but it’s close.

_"Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter."_  
  
-Oscar Wilde

* * *

 

Lucretia sits on Taako’s bunk, leaning up against the wall, with her notepad on her knees and her tray of art supplies beside her. Taako stands at his closet, hands on his hips. “Painting,” he murmurs, not looking at her. He touches a long velvet dress, then moves onto the next. “Predictable, Creesh, I gotta say.”

She laughs. “What, I’m supposed to become a brilliant artist in some skill I’ve never even tried in less than a year? Besides, I _like_ painting.” She flips to a fresh page of her journal and picks up a pencil, then starts sketching. “It’ll be nice to have a whole year to just work on art.” She tries blocking out some shapes to get ideas for a pose to draw. “What about you?”

Taako yawns dramatically and stretches his arms outwards, then resumes browsing the closet. For just a moment, he turns and peeks at Lucretia, who’s sketching with her lips pressed into a hard line. He turns back and takes a gaudy sequined dress from the closet.

“Dunno, is there anything Taako _can’t_ do?” He holds out the dress. “How about this little number?”

“That’s a lot of colors all at once.” She squints at first the dress, then her paints. “I’m pretty sure you have to pick _something_ , though. Merle’s actually going to stay with us this year, said something about dance? Which I guess that tracks. And Mags wants to learn woodcarving, of all things. What’s Lup doing?”

“So you’re saying it’ll be a pain in the ass to paint?” Taako grins and takes the sequinned dress off of the hanger. He slips it on, laughing as she sighs. “And Lup’s…” and it’s his turn to sigh, so soft that he hopes Lucretia can’t hear. “I dunno. Off with Barold as usual. Something with music, I think.”

“Mmmm, with Barry, huh?” She taps the end of the pencil against the paper, sharper than she expects or intends. “I’m sure it’ll be…. I’m sure they’ll be great.” She rips off the first page with its rough sketches and picks up a brush. “And I’m absolutely not saying that dress is a pain in the ass.” She dips the brush into a cup of clean water on the bedside table, then hesitates looking at her watercolors. “Well, okay, maybe. Practice makes perfect, though, right?”

In the dress, Taako strikes a dramatic pose. “Don’t need practice when you’re _this_ perfect,” he says, then flops down onto the couch, one leg extended. Lucretia laughs.

“Lup used to play the fiddle, way back when.” He waves a hand dismissively, as if to fan away the less-than-ideal memories of home. “Play for your supper, right? Made a pretty good team for that shit, before I really started cooking.”

He doesn't talk about _before_ much, and she's only ever asked enough to fulfill her official role as chronicler. Which, honestly, it's not much more than what Lup had said forty-some years ago: they'd crushed that world, and it held nothing else for them.

“Did you play…or sing…?” She clears her throat as she doodles with colors, trying to figure out how to make this effect work. “Cap was going to go talk to some singing instructors, maybe he could introduce you….”

He shifts on the couch, though not uncomfortably. “Eh. I can sing when I have to, I’ve got this fuckin’ _instrument.”_ He trails his manicured fingertips over his throat. “But it’s not really Taako’s gig. Dunno what I’m gonna do. But I’ll have a _lot_ of free time to do it.”

He doesn’t say that he was disappointed when Lup had immediately partnered with Barry when they heard they’d need to spend the year studying, or that he’d been feeling distance growing between he and his sister long before. How could they be stuck on a ship together for maybe forever but be getting further apart?

She frowns at his morose expression. Not like they haven’t had this “why the hell that nerd” conversation before; also the “why the hell is it taking them so long” conversation, which was sometimes one and the same. She peels a strip off of her sketch and wads it up into a ball, which she promptly flicks at his forehead.

“You’re brooding,” she says. “I don’t wanna paint that expression.” And she sticks her tongue out at him.

“If I’m sitting for a _portrait_ I’m not going to smile. _Wrinkles.”_ He motions to his face, but smiles anyway, because she’s right, and he can’t help but concede. Lucretia can usually lure a smile out of him on days he’d rather chew glass than laugh. He grabs the ball of paper off the floor and tosses it back at her, but misses.

“Do elves even _get_ wrinkles? Or do they, like, appear all at once when you turn 700 or something? Anyway, it’s not a portrait, really, more like a study. Although if you like I could paint a real portrait, something big like the beach year family picture? I’m going to have to do a lot of paintings to be good enough, I think.” She scoots forward on the bed, tilting her head and squinting, trying to figure out how to get that sparkle entirely with shading.

“My face resets every year, so I guess I’m technically never gonna get ‘em. But yeah, elves get wrinkles. Shoulda seen my great aunt.” And he laughs. “You do whatever you want. I’m just giving you shit. I got nowhere to be.”

“You can’t just, like, be a muse as an art form, I’m pretty sure.” She tears off the page with all the attempts at doing sequins in watercolor and sets it aside with a wrinkle of her nose, then starts a fresh sketch to outline his pose sprawled on the couch.

“I can make _anything_ an art form.” He rolls his head to the side and parts his lips like a model, then laughs to himself. “But I guess that’s true, seems like these stiffs want me on the straight and narrow.”

She finishes outlining the basic shape that she wants before starting on the watercolor. “I guess if you really want to find a way to just loll about and tell people stuff, there’s probably a way.” She shrugs. “Virgil said ‘fortune favors the bold.’” She taps a fingertip on the paper. “I used to repeat that to myself to do stuff like….” She laughs. “I kept saying it over and over when I was getting ready to apply to the IPRE. So yeah, be bold, I guess.”

“I kept saying ‘I gotta get the fuck off this plane of existence for a hot minute,’ but that’s a good one too.” Taako frowns, thinking for a moment. “But, ‘you can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water,’ right?”

“Nice. I don’t think I’ve heard that before, but it’s a good sentiment.”

Taako smirks and taps his forehead. “That’s all….” Before he can jokingly claim the words, he sits up a little, which disrupts her observation of the folds of the dress. “Huh, actually…”

She raises an eyebrow. “What is it?” The smirk has transformed into a familiar smile: Taako with an idea. Something brilliant and off-kilter, assuredly. She sketches quickly to try and capture it before his mood shifts again.

“Oh, nothin’, I just straight up crushed this year already. It’s philosophy time. Hell yeah.” He looks as though he could stand up to go pace the room, but stops himself when he remembers he’s being drawn. He clears his throat. “‘A mediocre idea that generates enthusiasm will go further than a great idea that inspires no one,’ as it were.” And he reclines on the couch back to his original position. “ _You_ know that’s not my own wisdom, but _these fools don’t.”_

She sets down the paper and pencil and puts the brush into the cup of water. Red paint dissolves and swirls in the cup. She pinches the bridge of her nose.

“Taako. Really?” She shakes her head, letting out a little laugh. “You're going to —”

“‘Average people have great ideas. Legends have great execution,’ bubbeleh.” His smile persists, growing wider with her laugh. “Now, that one’s _anonymous_ in the first place, so you can’t even be mad at me borrowing it.”

She rubs her hand across her face. “But that — isn't that _cheating?”_

 _“‘_ If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.’ Eddie Guerrero, now Taako. Boom.” He waves to her paper. “Keep painting, the world needs my wisdom ASAP.”

“Pretty sayings don't make it any less of a lie,” she says, although with a mild tone, and picking up the notebook as she says it. She dips the brush back into the paint, then drags it along a line of her sketch, watching the pigment blossom slowly into the contour of his dress. He's sitting still, for once, obviously and deliberately posing, and she thinks maybe she's capturing a little something of his essence with this one. “You have enough of that sort of thing in your head to impress the mountain, you think?”

“‘Knowledge speaks, but wisdom _listens_.’ Jimi Hendrix, now Taako. Yeah, I know, right?” He waits for her reaction, but she’s too focused on the drawing to shoot him a look yet. “If I run out, I can just break that one out. Damn, I got this one in the bag, Luce.”

She glances at him momentarily, just to help with her painting. “I certainly hope so. I'd hate to think you were…” She frowns slightly. “...goofing? At the expense of getting the light.”

He pauses, silenced by her point. “I— well, at least _one_ of you is bound to get it, and— you, or Lup and Barry, at least—“ He stops himself, embarrassed at his stammer. He forces himself to relax and slumps slightly against the couch. “We’ll be fine. And I’m gonna crush it anyway, sooo…”

He wants to see what she’s painting, but he doesn’t want to disrupt her work. The sequins feel a little itchy beneath the arm that’s resting at his side, but he doesn’t move for fear of ruining what she’s working on.

“I'm sure you will. I guess it's nice you're passing on something of the home world.” She adds more highlights before moving to the color of his hair. “I've thought about painting some….” She doesn't expect the twinge of grief. “You know, places we've seen, or maybe something of….” She sighs. “Those first few years, I wrote down everything I could remember — although it never occurred to me to record all those aphorisms — but I haven't drawn much.”

Taako feels heavy as he watches her flick the brush lightly, then start to delicately place a tiny highlight on what he guesses is each suggestion of a sequin. “Do you think…” He’s not sure what he wants to ask. All of it feels a little foolish. _Do you think it’s all gone? Do you think we’ll be on the run forever?_ “...you remember enough to paint something from home?” He fills the silence with a short laugh. “Get a theme going, yeah?”

She pauses, closing her eyes. There are places that she remembers as clearly as if she'd been there yesterday. A quality of light…. It's strange how sometimes they'll encounter something so similar, but so far not that. “I think so? I hope so.” She smiles sadly. “Like you say, it's not like they'll know the difference. But I would _like_ to get it right. And then yes, we'll have a bit of a theme, you and I.”

“Wait, scratch that, make it a _competition…_ Bets? Make it interesting? Huh?” But for all his joking, he wonders what she’ll make. It’s difficult enough looking at the portrait that hangs on the ship from the beach, a moment captured of the last time they were all truly _happy._ Would seeing home again be just as hard? “I’ve got a vintage from a couple planes ago that says I get in on that mountain madness before you do.”

“You've been holding out on me! That was the good shit. So whichever of us actually gets into this mountain gets that bottle?” She adds a few bits of color to the painting. “Not just ‘accepted’ or whatever they call it?” Not like it matters, exactly: on some level, just getting the light of creation will be reward enough. Still, it was good wine. “Okay, let's do it.”

Taako hops up off the couch all at once and crosses the room to his closet once more. “You’re on. Unless I drink it first, then… you’ll just get bragging rights.”

He leans over the end of the bed and peers over her shoulder and sees the almost-finished product on her sketchpad. The details are a little fuzzy, but there he is, dress and hair and all. He smiles a little, but only because she can’t see.

“I’m not worried,” he says, and she laughs. “Got this one in the bag. Prepared to get dunked on. Yup.”

It's a reasonably good likeness, she thinks. If they were ever to be apart, it would be a good reminder, but they're never separated for more than a few months. Still, she's captured something here, and she's pleased with it.

 _“Pride goes before a fall,”_ she murmurs, half to him, half to herself. Then: “Don't you dare drink that wine without me.”

Taako hops up onto the bed beside her and rests his elbow on her shoulder. His voice is a little softer than he wants it to be as he admires her work. “Wouldn’t dream of it.” He pats the top of her head and smirks. And he teases, “My nose is a little funky,” even though it’s not. The painting is perfect.

“That's your nose’s fault,” she says mildly. She puts down pencil and brush, giving the whole thing one last look. “You can have this one, if you want. I'll probably do another later.”

“Keep it as a memento.” He grins and returns to the closet. “Something to remember me by… I might not be this young and beautiful forever.” He finds his pajamas on the floor in front of him. “But if this cycle shit keeps up, I probably will.”

“You want to go down to the Conservatory and find the philosophy folks?” she asks, not adding _dressed like that,_ because of course _dressed like that._

“Yeah, let’s see if we can find Mags and get a bite to eat, huh? All that modeling’s left me _starving.”_

She stands and gathers her supplies and they head into the corridor together. “I bet he’ll want something to eat after all that hard work with knives and big blocks of wood. Just let me put this in my room?” She pins the painting to her board to dry and puts her pencils and brushes and paints on her desk.

Taako is standing in the doorway when she turns. He surveys her space, her sketches of the crew on the corkboard, her shelves and shelves of journals, and her, standing there, still smiling.

“Hey, ‘Painting is just another way of keeping a diary,’ huh, Creesh?” He grins wide as she rolls her eyes and meets him at the door. “Pablo Picasso, now Taako.” And they laugh together, and leave the ship arm in arm.


End file.
